Shed Inbox Guilt! 8 Email Templates for Wedding Suppliers

I have long preached about the virtues of using email templates. Although I’d love to be able to reply to every email I get personally, when you get upwards of 200 of them a day like I do, it’s simply not practical or possible.

Email templates are a life saver. They will free you from the shackles of your inbox and enable you to reply to messages more efficiently and with less guilt. Of course not every single email you receive can be replied to with a template, but having a stock of them in your arsenal will make your email-life a whole lot easier.

To get you started I’ve compiled examples of how to reply to some of the messages that are often received by wedding industry professionals. Feel free to use these as they are, or take and edit them to suit your own needs.

Hello, I am getting married on 20th June and I’d like to hear about the packages you offer. How much do you cost?

Hi {NAME}

Thanks for your enquiry and congratulations on your engagement, exciting times! I’m currently free on the 20th and would love to be involved in your day. The venue you’ve booked is gorgeous. I’ve worked on a few weddings there in the past. You can check them out here if you like (link).

I have attached my brochure which explains all the options. My packages are pretty straight forward and prices start from X. Please let me know if you have any further questions after reviewing it.

I’m getting pretty booked up for next year now so if this is within your budget then let’s talk some more. If not then I hope it all goes well with the rest of your planning.

Hey! I’m getting married on 20th June and I’d love to hear about the packages you offer. Our budget is pretty tight and we can only allocate (something way below what you charge) but we really love your work!

(Option one)

Hi {NAME}

Thanks for your enquiry and congratulations on your engagement, exciting times! I’m currently free on the 20th and would love to be involved in your day.

My packages start from X which unfortunately seems quite a bit above your budget. However if you’re more flexible on what you can allocate to your wedding photography/ flowers/ stationery let me know and we can see if we can make it happen!

Alternatively here are some other photographers/ florists/ stationers that might be closer to your budget (links). They’re all awesome at what they do and I recommend them wholeheartedly!

Good luck with the rest of your planning.

(Option two)

Hi {NAME}

Thanks for your enquiry and congratulations on your engagement, exciting times! I’m currently free on the 20th and would love to be involved in your day.

My packages usually start from X however as you are getting married out of season/ your wedding is local to me/ you only want me for a few hours, I would be able to come down to £X if you don’t have a Y/ you reduce Z.

Let me know if this is something you’d like to consider, if not I hope it all goes well with the rest of your planning.

I’d love to book you, but you’re too expensive. Can I have a big juicy discount for no other reason other than I asked?

Hi {NAME}

Great to hear from you again and I’m thrilled that you’re interested in booking my services. Unfortunately at the moment I’m getting pretty booked up so am unable to offer any discounts. However if you’d like to remove X from the basic package I could reduce the cost by Y.

If you’d like to go ahead with the booking let me know and I can explain the next step.

Hi there, I love what you do. Here is my life story for no other reason than I want to tell you about it.

Hi {NAME}

Thanks so much for taking the time to email me. It’s always such an honour when someone reaches out. I loved reading your story. I too struggled with {BLANK} when I started out. I overcame it by {BLANK} and I know you will too.

I’m sending back warm n fuzzies and I can’t wait to see where your journey takes you next!

Hey! I love what you do. I too want to be a wedding photographer/ planner/ blogger. Can you please tell me exactly what I need to do in order to be successful?

Hi {NAME}

Thanks for your email. As you can probably imagine I’m a pretty busy bee and I’m not able to offer one on one business advice over email. However to get you started I’d suggest checking out these blog posts (link) on my site or subscribing to these blogs (link) that I admire. Their articles really helped me when I was in your position.

If you’re really serious about making it happen, I host my own workshop (link) where we cover {BLANK} / I attended this workshop (link) which I found incredibly helpful when I launched my business. I can’t recommend it enough.

Good luck with everything, I know you can do it!

You don’t know me, but I have this event coming up for charity. Would you like to donate your time/ products to it for free?

Hello {NAME}

Thanks so much for your message. I’m thrilled that you love what I do and honoured that you’ve reached out.

Unfortunately incredibly time-poor and simply unable to say yes to every request like this that I receive. I wish you all the luck in the world for your project / event / charity drive. It sounds like it’s going to be amazing!

I’m planning my wedding and I’m struggling with {BLANK}. I don’t have any intention of buying your product or booking your services but I thought you might be able to help me.

Hey there {NAME}

Thanks for your email. It’s always a thrill to hear from people who love what I do so much that they want to ask my advice!

(If you know the answer to their question, go ahead and answer it but if it’s more complicated…)

Unfortunately I’m not sure I’m the best person to help with your query. I’d suggest checking out these articles I’ve written / found which might shed some light. Alternatively Google was a massive help for me when planning my own wedding so I’d always recommend starting there!

Good morning. I am from Company X. We love what you do and would like to work on this project with you. We don’t have any budget to pay you but it will be great exposure for your company. We’ll mention you on our own blog and social media!

Hi {NAME}

Thanks so much for thinking of me, I’m really honoured. Unfortunately I can’t work for exposure, it doesn’t pay my mortgage after all! However I love what you do and if you’re able to allocate some budget to pay me, I’d love to discuss the options.

Thank you to Alex Franzen who wrote a similar post about this and who I shamelessly nicked the idea from. She has a killer e-course called I ❤ Email which you should definitely check out if you want to get a handle on your own inbox!

This is great Kat! My personal favourite is: “I’m planning my wedding and I’m struggling with {BLANK}. I don’t have any intention of buying your product or booking your services but I thought you might be able to help me”. It made me laugh as I, and I’m sure many other readers, get this type of enquiry quite often. Thanks for sharing your very diplomatic and well thought out response bank. I shall be trying some out soon! Kerry. xx

aaahh, major lightbulb moment. I did have templates – not all is lost! – but these have given me a fresh approach on how to rework some of them and add some that I didn’t have a (polite) response to…now I do. Fabulously useful, as always. Thank you 🙂

Yep, templates are definitely the way to go! I have mine already all set up and it means I can write a very detailed and informative email to potential clients without having to reinvent the wheel each time.

One thing I do is on the template, where there is an area I need to personalise, or possibly isn’t relevant to every enquiry, I have this in red type so I can easily see it when I paste it into the email window – I can then just quickly run down the page and change what needs to be amended. I’m sure there is a fancy way to do this in Word with mail merge or similar, but I’m not that technical 🙂

Brilliant. I’m having a crazy day, this cheered me up. Now I just need to go away and decide how I feel amount the fact that email templates cheer me up 😉 Seriously though, as always some good advice here!
Thank you
Kerry
x

This is brilliant and really made me chuckle for some reason! If I was on the receiving end, I would think it had been written just for me! Also, I’d need a template to respond to this type of email which I received today: “I need job. And would very much like to work at your company as I have been to college. Here is my CV”. Good one.

Oh these are great! I’ve been using a few email templates for my vintage rentals and they are SUCH a timesaver! I usually try to incorporate at least one personal message in each canned email response. Anything we can do to automate systems makes our lives much, much easier!

These are great! Quick tip that someone shared with me ages ago: use your email “signatures” for quick and easy “template” replies! I have them set up for all kinda of inquiries and notifications. Easy stuff!

Love these!! Kat, you are a genius and I am shamelessly pinching these for future use. On the plus side, I tell people about you and this blog all the time so I feel relatively guilt-free about my pickpocketing ways 😉

As a bride-to-be (and clearly not the target demographic for this blog post), I was actually really upset to read your template suggestions, and even more shocked by the positive comments above.

It’s nice to know that when I’m emailing wedding suppliers and bloggers for advice for my wedding day, that some of them will just send you back a snotty email template because they’re far too busy and important for the little people.

When you get as many emails as so many wedding professionals do, many of which require the same information, it simply makes no sense to type every reply out individually each time. Of course each response will also have personal bits included, the person’s name etc (after all these are just a guide) but if someone is just saying “can I have your prices?” i personally think its a brilliant time saver to have some templates you can simply copy, paste and send back. Without them response times would be much longer too. Wouldn’t you rather get a template reply with all the info you need within 24 hours rather than waiting a week or more for a personally written response?

There is nothing snotty about it, it’s about being as efficient as possible. After all sending and receiving emails is just one small part of our businesses, we have everything else to do too!

Thanks for your reply. I’m not disputing that use of email templates is sensible, and if you’re receiving hundreds of messages every day, then sure, use a template response. Maybe I didn’t explain myself clearly in my first comment.

It was more the tone of your paraphrased email enquiries that upset me –

“Hi there, I love what you do. Here is my life story for no other reason than I want to tell you about it.”

“I’m planning my wedding and I’m struggling with {BLANK}. I don’t have any intention of buying your product or booking your services but I thought you might be able to help me.”

Brides aren’t familiar with the industry and maybe they don’t understand just how busy you all are. But they’re often confused, overwhelmed by wedding planning and just reaching out for a bit of help – not intentionally trying to waste your time.

In my opinion, the whole post comes across as patronising and quite frankly rude. I won’t bother replying again because we clearly don’t see eye to eye on this. Along with being bride, I also run a small business – and I don’t agree with the way the post comes across from either perspective.

The thing is, Anna, a lot of people (myself included) get those kinds of “can you give me some advice please?” emails just as often as any other kind of enquiries… there’s simply no way I could reply to every single one individually, but at least this way they get some kind of response (rather than never hearing anything back which sucks) and hopefully the answer to their question or at least some links that they can check out to find the answer themselves. I know some people don’t understand how busy the people they’re emailing are, hence why templates are so awesome because then they can reply and not just leave them hanging.

I wasn’t trying to be rude but I guess my paraphrasing (that was meant to be humorous) offended you, so I am sorry you felt that way.